Today I got up about 7:30. My alarm goes off at 6, but most of the time I just snooze until 7:30. It doesn’t really matter when I get to work in the morning as long as I don’t miss meetings. I showered and got ready, looked at my calendar for the day, and noticed that I didn’t have any meetings scheduled all day. It was beautiful outside, so I decided to stay at home and work where I have a window I can open instead of going in to my windowless office.
My home system is set up so that I can essentially do everything that I could from my office. I connect to the lab network, then use remote desktop to get to my work computer. I have multi monitors at work and at home, so when I use remote desktop it looks exactly like my desktop at work, and I can use my mouse and keyboard here to control my work computer. It’s pretty slick, but I’ve been doing this for years now, so I’m used to it.
The next step was to deal with my phone. Usually I have it set up to forward to my cell phone, so it doesn’t matter where I am; I’ll always get the phone call. I had turned it off yesterday for no particular reason, so I needed to take care of that. We have a system that allows us to create rules for our phone so that it will go straight to voice mail after work hours or it will page someone if the caller has a specific phone number or whatever. It’s pretty cool. I set it up to forward to my cell and send me an email (since my phone doesn’t get good reception when I’m in my apartment and I don’t like missing calls).
Next I needed some tunes. I’ve been listening to Pandora lately, which is a web site that lets you pick a song or artist and it will play similar songs and artists. I turned on my laptop and used my wireless and hooked the audio to my speakers. I used my laptop because I didn’t want the audio traffic to have to go through the lab network to get to me. It’d just slow things down that way.
Finally, the project I’m on right now requires writing software for a mobile phone, which was sitting in my office. Fortunately, it was plugged in to my computer there, and I have software which acts like remote desktop onto the phone, so I could see the screen and interact with it through the computer. At one point, someone else on the project needed the phone for a demo, so he messaged me and I told him he could have it as long as he plugged it back in when he was done. I could tell the instant he unplugged it and plugged it back in.
And that’s just the basics of what I was doing today. If you drew a map of all the network traffic I was generating and all the convoluted things I was doing, it would look like spaghetti. I was having so much fun, sitting in my apartment and basking in the cool air and nice sun, and nobody could tell that I wasn’t actually there in my office.